


After Thessia

by atrilial



Series: Lilly Shepard [5]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, FemShep - Freeform, Shakarian - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 17:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrilial/pseuds/atrilial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lilly Shepard has a meltdown after Thessia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Thessia

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This is fairly raw, without much editing, but I rather like the way it came out. This will eventually probably be part of a larger story.

_Dammit Joker. Dammit. Fucking dammit!_ Lilly slammed her helmet against the fish tank, vaguely hoping it would shatter. Shatter like everything fucking else in this fucked up galaxy. Like she wanted to shatter Kai Leng’s face. Like she would shatter if she had to survive one more fucking day of loss and pain and defeat and hopelessness, followed by one more night of crippling nightmares, agonizing memories of dead comrades, and crushing, _crushing_ guilt. But the plexiglass of the tank stood fast, infuriatingly undamaged. Just like everyone expected her to be. 

_Dammit. Dammit! DAMMIT!_ “I’m done!” She screamed “I can’t do it any more! You hear me?! You hear me?!! You win! I give up!” 

Who she screamed at she didn’t know. Harbinger, who she was growing more and more convinced was fucking with her brain? The God she vaguely remembered her long-since-dead father praying to when she was little? Maybe just the universe as a whole. 

“I’m fucking done,” she muttered, picking her helmet off the ground. The side was singed black, a shot that had pierced her shields and just barely missed doing the same to her brain. It was a sick joke really. A sick, universal joke: that she kept surviving every impossible battle, kept pressing forward while everyone, every decent person, every person better than her, one by one fell before her eyes. 

Even when it had finally seemed like it was all over, the great beyond mocked her and sent her back. _Cerberus._ Even the thought felt like a snarl. This was their fault. If they’d just left well enough alone, let nature take its course, she’d be free. Free of all this heartache and futility and _fucking guilt_. Regret and remorse. There were few things so completely and utterly debilitating. Though the consuming shame certainly didn’t help. 

God, how did she even put one foot in front of the other. If someone looked closely enough, they would see a mountain taller than Olympus Mons on Mars of every mistake she ever made, every person she ever wronged, ever failed. It was all she could do to keep her back straight, to not bend, kneel, lay prostrate on the floor under the weight of it. 

Even as she thought it, it suddenly seemed unbearable, insupportable, and she sank to her knees. Pressing her forehead to the floor, her hands tore at her chest, ripping the thin fabric of her under armour. If only she could gouge her heart out maybe it wouldn’t hurt so fucking much. 

Her body began to shake, convulse, and it was all she could do to breath as tears, tears she’d fought against for years, finally surfaced as a dam breaking. The floodgates opened, and she trembled and gasped and sobbed. She would suffocate like this. The thought was vague, but relieving. Her grief had finally overcome her, and she would die gasping just as she had above Alchera. 

She choked and sob and heaved. But it wasn’t enough. Slowly, her breathing calmed, her tears began to dry. “No...” she whimpered. “No, please. Please...” _let me die. Just let me die._ Nevertheless, her sobs faded, then ceased altogether, dried tears stretching the skin of her cheeks. She lay curled on the floor, drained, spent, empty. She had nothing left to give. 

Above her she could feel the weight of the eyes of everyone whose blood was on her hands. No amount of washing, endless, relentless, scrubbing could cleanse her of their crimson life smeared across her palms in her mind’s eye. 

Cassandra, her twin, her sister, who she’d never really known. _It should have been me on Mindoir that day._ Her father had taken the wrong girl to her death. Cassandra should have lived, would have been the better choice, the better Shepard. 

Jenkins, lost following her lead. 

Ashley, _Ashley_ who she’d sentenced to death on Virmire. 

Matriarch Benezia, Liara’s own mother, Liara whose trust in Lilly was so blind, so implicit, so foolish. 

Saren, who’d blown off his own head because of _her_ , because of the things she’d said. 

The crew of the Normandy SR-1.

The colonists of Horizon and so many others she’d been too late to save; the one that she arrived just in time to watch consumed, turned into Reaper material. 

The whole of the Arohtot system, their four eyes screaming that maybe she hadn’t tried enough, maybe she’d been careless because they weren’t human, because she was more prejudiced than she wanted to admit. 

That boy back on Earth who she’d been within reach of, could have saved if she hadn’t let herself get distracted, and all the others dying back on earth because she hadn’t been persuasive enough, aggressive enough, to ensure the Reapers wouldn’t catch them flat footed.

Thane.

Mordin.

Legion. 

Her friends, _friends_ , who she’d failed so utterly and completely. 

Joker’s family and so many others on Tiptree and every other world that had fallen because she’d let the Reapers win. 

And now Thessia and everyone else she’d ever been too slow, too naive, too trusting, too weak, too _late_ to save. 

They glared at her, condemning, asking why. Why were they dead and not she? Each added another shackle, pulling her down, dragging behind her, cursing her. 

Death would be little consolation, she realized, for surely even then, they would be chained to her. 

_I wear the chain I forged in life! I made it link by link and yard by yard! I gartered it on of my own free will and by my own free will, I wore it!_

Jacob Marley’s words had haunted her when she’d read them and now they seemed almost prophetic. 

The eyes of the dead beat down on her like the beating of the heart beneath the floorboards, slowly driving her mad. Their voices whispered incessantly in her mind, waking and sleeping, and she could not find release from them, and she no longer had the strength, the will, to try.

 

Garrus step into the cabin, a tension, a black fear he could not shake wrapped around his heart. The room was so quiet, too quiet. For a moment he feared the worst. He hurried quickly, dread growing with each step he took further into the room. 

As her body began to come into view on the floor, still, limp, lifeless, his breaths began to come in short gasps, panic clouding his eyes. Keening desperately, pleadingly, he leaned over her, his scanner reading her vitals. He exhaled sharply. 

She was alive. 

Nearly catatonic, eyes staring blankly in front of her, but she was alive. 

Gently, as though she were a fragile porcelain doll, he lifted her from the floor and into his arms. He cradled her against him a moment, alarmed at how cold and clammy her skin felt. Tenderly he lay her on the bed, pulling off her soiled and shredded garments. 

He pulled the blanket over her, tucking her in as he’d done for his sister many a night when she was little and still afraid of monsters. Lilly looked like that now, both young and somehow ancient, vulnerable and so very breakable. He settled carefully beside her on the covers, wrapping his arm protectively around her and burying his face against her neck, against the pulse there that assured him her heart was still beating. 

“You’ll get through this, Lilly,” he whispered in her ear, in the hopes that somewhere in there she could hear him. “I’ve got your back. I won’t let anything defeat you,” he said fiercely, “Not even you.”


End file.
